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Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Economist: Agriculture can lift RP from crisis
By Jessica B. Natad
AGRICULTURE, aside from information technology (IT), will save the country from the economic crisis it has been experiencing since 1997, according to an economist.
“We (Philippines) will recover our lost glory if the government will support the country’s farmers—in logistics and financial (means). It is about time that government shifts its support to agriculture, which has been neglected for years, because of its prioritizing white elephants projects such as the National Steel Corp., among others,” said University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) School of Economics dean Bernardo Villegas.
He said the Philippines could not rely anymore on its manufacturing sector, with China and Indonesia having lower labor costs of as low as $1 per day as compared to the Philippines’ labor cost of about $4 per day.
Villegas also advised farmers to shift to farming high-value crops such as lettuce, asparagus, durian, pili nuts, pineapple, mango and banana, and leave the production of rice and sugar to Thailand and Taiwan.
Advantage
“Nothing will happen to us if we go on planting low-value crops because other countries in Asia such as Thailand have the comparative advantage of producing the crops. We have to think more lettuce, more asparagus…,” he said.
During a seminar at Cebu City Marriott Hotel last week, he also said the country’s importation of rice and sugar from other countries should not alarm the Filipinos.
“It’s part of comparative advantage. There is nothing wrong with importation. No country could live on its own.”
On the other hand, he said high-value crops would earn higher income because these are the food of the higher-income markets.
Villegas added that growing high-value crops does not require a huge property. A two- to three-hectare farm will do.
Meanwhile, he lauded the administration of President Arroyo in its thrust of supporting the agricultural sector.
Villegas said the agricultural sector needs more financial and logistics support such as good irrigation systems and farm-to-market roads.
Less privileged
Earlier, state-owned Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP) president and chief executive officer Gary Teves said LBP had been working toward the realization of its mandate to serve the country’s less privileged entrepreneurs including the agro-agricultural sector.
He said LBP aims to increase the rate of the loan takeout from these sectors to 64 percent by 2004 from 38 percent in the year 2000.
Another bank, Development Bank of the Philippines, said it had gone back to financing agriculture-related loans last year to support the government’s thrust, DBP assistant vice president Fausto Aragones Jr. said.
DBP had been financing industrial and commercial loans, he said.
Aragones said agricultural logistics such as grains processing centers, bulk trucking, grains terminals, bulk carriers and other post-harvest facilities are projects that can be financed by DBP’s Sustainable Logistics Development Program (SLDP).
SLDP is an investment-financing program for a comprehensive and integrated transport as well as related infrastructure and support services.
(April 16, 2003 issue)
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